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The Chris Hedges Report
The Narco-Trafficking Elite Set to Run Venezuela (w/ Maureen Tkacik) | The Chris Hedges Report
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- [00:10]
A
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is being held in a Brooklyn jail charged with smuggling cocaine into the United States. But even the Drug Enforcement Agency estimates that less than 10% of cocaine shipments to the United States come through Venezuela. The vast majority of cocaine shipments originate in Colombia and move through the Pacific route and Mexico. Added to this, most overdose deaths in the US come from fentanyl and fentanyl does not originate from Venezuela. There are no shortages of Latin American leaders and military chiefs who are heavily involved in drug trafficking, but who are considered close allies of the United States. One of them, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, was pardoned by Donald Trump last month after he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for conspiring to distribute over 400 tons of cocaine in the U.S. a conviction that was justified with far greater evidence than that which supports the charges levied against Maduro. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was also Trump's national security Adviser, comes out of the right wing Cuban exile community in Miami, one that has for decades engaged in drug trafficking and a dirty war against those it condemns like Maduro, of being communists. The investigative journalist Maureen Tasek at the prospect in her article Narco Terrorist Elite looks at the close ties these anti communist Cubans, including Rubio's inner circle, have with the drug trade and, and their full throated support for Latin American leaders, including the Ecuadorian president whose family fruit business is accused of trafficking 700 kilos of cocaine who are engaged in drug trafficking. Joining me to discuss this long nexus between the drug trade in Latin America and the Cuban anti communist movement, as well as the CIA and the DEA, is Maureen Tasek. It's a great article and let's just go through it. I want to begin with how you open it. So you're talking about Marco Rubio as a teenager working for his brother in law, Orlando. Cecilia, explain.
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B
Well, Marco Rubio has a sister who is substantially older than him, maybe 10, eight or 10 years older than him, and got married fairly young. She met a man named Orlando in high school. He had come over to Miami in the early 70s, I want to say 1972. They fell in love. His family moved to Las Vegas in 1979 and I'm not sure why he, I think he, he has suggested that there was a strike. He thought that he would get better opportunities. He was working as a bartender and a banquet waiter. So he thought that there was better opportunity in the restaurant business in Las Vegas. So they go to Las Veg Vegas and his sister doesn't want to go. And she stays in Miami with Orlando. And many of his happiest childhood memories are, you know, times when they returned for Christmas to Miami. The times they went home and Orlando made them a big, you know, homestyle Cuban meal. He butchered a whole pig. You know, he, he, he put together Marco Rubio's bicycle at Christmas when he was 8 years old. Just this sort of wonderful figure in Marco Rubio's life when they finally decide to move back.
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A
Let me just interrupt. This is a. This is according to Marco Rubio's memoir.
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B
Yes, this is according to Marco Rubio's memoir. There's been, there's also been biographies. There's a biography of him written by the Washington Post reporter Manuel Roy Franzia. So this is sort of. Yes, this is the version of his life. And Orlando Cecilia begins working for a pet store in 1983. And he has, you know, Marco, little Marco, literal little Marco doing some odd jobs building cages and looking after his dogs. Pet related dog jobs. And, and Marco Rubio makes enough money to go see every single Miami Dolphins home game in, you know, the 1985 season. I think maybe 1984, 1985 season. I gotta get that right. But, but anyhow, turns out 1987 rolls along and Cecilia gets locked up. He's one of, I think, 11 individuals indicted in this, you know, in operation, what is it, Operation Giraffe or something like that, Some, some reference to the pet store, actually, it was a front for a cocaine and marijuana trafficking organization that, what do you know, had been in operation since 1976, was accused of us, you know, trafficking at least $79 million worth of. And, you know, speaking in code words about the drugs on wires. You know, there were a lot of. But basically the idea was that the pet store was a front for a cocaine trafficking organization. Now, the leader, you know, the leader or the leader son of this operation has since starred on a very popular show called Tiger King. And he claims now that he only sold coke to support his animal habit because he loves exotic animals so much, but it's an awful lot of drugs that he trafficked. And it turns out also, and this is what, you know, this is a known story. It's not like I broke the story of, you know, Marco Rubio's brother in law being a drug trafficker. This has been well known since 2011. The story was broken by Univision. It somehow, you know, not reached conventional wisdom. I sort of thought it had, but a lot of people have been shocked by this. But I thought if I Look a little bit into this guy's drug trafficking organization. I bet it might tell us something about the milieu of, you know, Cuban drug trafficking in Miami in the 80s and kind of how that fits into the larger, you know, geopolitical scene here. Right. And what do you know, what I didn't realize until I started peeling away the layers is that cocaine trafficking, drug trafficking generally in the United States between the late 60s at least and the late 80s was totally dominated by Bay of Pigs veterans, veterans of this supposed massive fuck up in American history, this sort of joke. But it was a very, it lives on. It was a very successful sort of network. All of those guys who were veterans, and I think that there were 1500 veterans of the Beipig's invasion. You know, they, they had a level of prominence and a certain amount of respect in the community, and a massive percentage of them got into drug trafficking in, in the late 60s. And this is from the very beginning. I found a, a story that had been totally forgotten from the early 60s. It's right big 19, where a Cuban woman, you know, comes to the CIA and says, listen, I think that, you know, my husband, I got this anonymous letter. My husband has been at a training camp for Manuel Artime was a doctor who led the Bay of Pigs Brigade 5206, or the MRR is, you know, there are various words for the group that launched the attack. Manuel Artime was the sort of charismatic leader of this group. He was also very controversial. And this woman says, you know, listen, my husband's disappeared. I haven't heard from him. He was recruited by Artime to go to Nicaragua to train for, you know, an invasion and overthrow of Castro. But I'm told that he was killed. And indeed, what they discovered is that he had been, you know, it was an inside job. And he had been killed because he was complaining about the fact that Arteme wasn't actually training anyone to do any invasions or, you know, overthrow Castro. He was training them to smuggle contraband. And at the time, it was whiskey and clothing. It was not narcotics that they were, that they were accused of smuggling. But very quickly, by 1971, there's this massive drug bust. 150 drug traffickers, the 150 of the biggest drug traffickers in America, all get arrested on a single day. And what do you know, you know, maybe 70% of them are Bay of Pigs veterans. So, you know, one of the Bay of Pigs veterans in the cocaine trafficking, you know, in the drug trafficking scene, not arrested that day, is a guy named Guillermo Tabral. I'm probably mispronouncing that, but Tabral had probably been a, a criminal before the revolution. I found a, an old clipping of him getting arrested for a car theft as part of a car theft enterprise in Havana in 1950. He ran a jewelry store that was extremely popular and they sold stolen jewelry. And the jewelry store was renowned for giving police officers and judges very, very good prices on, you know, gold cufflinks and Rolex watches. So this was a very popular jewelry store. And in, at some point he signs up to be a DEA CIA informant. And, and because the DEA has just been established, they realize that shit, all of these CIA affiliated Bay of Pigs veterans are, you know, in the cocaine trafficking and heroin trafficking business. Now we'd better figure out what they're up to. And a gentleman from the CIA comes in and says, you know, I can handle that. I'll set up a little agency inside this new dea and I will, you know, make sure that, that we. Everything about what the Bay of Pigs veterans are doing in the, you know, drug trafficking community. So Tabral signs up as an informant for this guy and at the same time he gets into trafficking marijuana and soon after cocaine through the jewelry store, through. And he also has a, an unlicensed abortion clinic. He's got a few different. And then later his son comes in and starts the pet store. And this is the enterprise. And it's connected to just an unbelievable array of Bay of Pigs veterans run trafficking organizations. Later Bay of Pigs or people associated. This artime has this, you know, accounting whiz kid protege who he trains in these, you know, sort of. He sets up this like, money laundering sort of university where he trains this kid in hotel rooms. And the kid doesn't know, you know, the names of his, his instructors or anything, but this guy goes on to become the Medellin cartel's lead accountant. So there's, it's this unbelievable cast of characters. They, you know, a lot of them, they're very, and, and, and you know, they. Very quickly after, you know, the, the CIA is always talking, they're always writing memos about how they need to cut these. But what they really became was this sort of, you know, secret police deep state of Latin America. And one of these characters is a guy named Felix Rodriguez. He remained a CIA asset, I think. I mean, he's still alive too, which is saying something because a lot of these guys have been murdered. And Felix Rodriguez is, is a real kind of, you know, rich and, you know, prolific character in the in kind of the history of Latin America.
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A
Well, let me just interrupt. Since I met him during the war in El Salvador. He was disguised as a Bolivian captain when they captured Che Guevara, was there for the execution of Che. And he used to show us his wristwatch and tell us that he'd taken it off the body of Che Guevara. So, and this was during the whole Iran Contra, which we'll get into, but I want to just stop because and go back to Rubio. You write that Rubio's approval ratings, you're writing about how they're the highest in the Republican Party. But you write even as he is the architect of what is arguably Trump's single most cynical policy, the scheme to appoint drug cartel bosses and their cronies atop the governments of every Latin American country in the name of fighting drug cartels. And then you go on. In September, Rubio hailed Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa, who leads a country whose homicide rate has risen Eightfold since 2016, as, quote, an incredibly willing partner who has, quote, done more just in the last couple years to take the fight to these narco terrorists and these threats to the security and stability of Ecuador than any previous administration. Just five months earlier, a damning investigation revealed that Noboa's family fruit business had traffic 700 kilos of cocaine to Europe in banana crates between 2020 and 2022. Rubio has tirelessly promoted the cause of convicted, alas, just pardoned drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernandez. In 2018, Rubio personally and publicly commended Hernandez, then president of Honduras, for combating drug traffickers and supporting Israel. Just seven months before his brother was indicted for trafficking 158 tons of cocaine in containers stamped th for Tony Hernandez. Rubio has raved about the crime fighting efforts of Salvadoran and Argentine junior strongman Naib Bukeli and Javier Melaye. In spite of the former's documented alliance with Ms. 13 and various Miami cocaine trafficking scandals that enveloped his libertarian political party last fall, as well as both leaders slavish devotion to the drug cartel's single favorite mode of money laundering. Rubio has been one of the Beltway's biggest backers of newly elected Chilean President Jose Antonio Cost, the son of a literal Nazi war criminal who has spent his entire political career lionizing, whitewashing and promising a restoration of the brutal reign of Augusto Pinochet, who personally ordered the Chilean army to build a cocaine laboratory, consolidated the narcotics trade inside his terrifying secret police, and then allegedly disappeared key conspirators like his secret Police Chief chemist Eugenio Berrios. At least for a decade, Rubio has lauded, strategized with and viciously condemned the multitude of criminal investigations into former Colombian President Alvaro Arribe, who some describe as a kind of Kissingerian figure to the former Florida center. I just want to read that because Rubio has, for years and years and years, and of course years and years and years calling for the overthrow of Chavez and Maduro, made these alliances with a variety of figures who the DEA and other agencies have investigated and found to be huge drug traffickers.
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B
Indeed, it's, and again, you know, this is not my area of expertise, come into writing about Latin America in a very circuitous fashion. But when you examine the evidence, it's shocking. Not shocking to you. You covered around Contra, but I grew up thinking initially that you know, oh, CIA involvement in cocaine was some sort of conspiracy theory. And then I, you know, did a little bit of research and realized, oh no, the CIA did, you know, over, they, they did traffic cocaine. That happened, you know, they, there are various excuses and reasons for that, but not really that like the CIA and its assets veritably invented cocaine trafficking. Verily, you know, really that you must be intelligence affiliated to kind of play in this game. And the right wing of, in Latin America, you know, they, it's, it's, it's so unbelievably cynical. It, it, you know, makes your head spin, but that, you know, the, the, the major drug traffickers are fascist right wing jerks and just who you would think would be involved in such a predatory and destructive industry as narcotics. So you know, there you go. And all of what's really, really surprising to me and, and I, and I understand that, I think to do business in Latin America, in order to be a politician in Latin America, you have to sort of, you have to deal with this being one of your industries. You know, this, this is, these are the power brokers in, in your region and you have to contend with them. You can't sort of pretend that they, you know, don't exist and you can't put them all away. They are more powerful than you will ever be. But, but is the cynicism. And, and it's also something that like because of the recently published Fort Bragg.
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A
Cartel, Seth Harp's book, which I interviewed him, the book is amazing. And yeah, you can explain just a.
- [20:52]
B
Little bit in that book, which is not about Latin America, it's about Afghanistan. You know, he really digs into, he expresses the similar sense of awe that he felt upon discovering that everything that we had ever said that we had ever heard about the Taliban trafficking heroin was the opposite of reality. The Taliban that was there, that was the source of almost all of their popular support, was that they had clamped down on that industry because it was not popular for the reasons that drug. There are destructive industries and you know, addictive narcotics are, Are, you know, probably the most destructive and they're not popular with, with, with anyone. But, you know, the Taliban had, had successfully sort of eradicated that industry in Afghanistan. Then we come in, we overthrow the Taliban, and what do you know, you know, you know that the poppies are back like never before.
- [22:04]
A
Hamid Karzai, who was our puppet and his brother, controlled 90% of the heroin trade. And what Seth documents in his books is how Delta Force and these other elite units came back essentially and started dealing. They could ship the drugs over easily started dealing drugs all up and down the eastern seaboard.
- [22:26]
B
And he also documents this really systematic effort to buy the DEA to suppress the evidence that this is happening. So, you know, they're saying, hey, look, we've tested the heroin and absolutely no heroin from Afghanistan is coming into America. It's all from Mexico or, you know, it's all from, from here. And those kinds of efforts that are made to conceal and distort what is plainly happening that everybody knows is also really quite astonishing. And in the earlier days of the dea, the agency had, I think, I'm not sure, but it seems like the agency had a lot more folks working for it who understood that their relationship with the CIA was going to be adversarial and that in order to like, actually eradicate drugs, they were going to come up against, you know, some very powerful people within their own government. Like, that was sort of understood. I think by now the, the DEA is just fully, you know, in on it. Um, but it, I felt a similar that, you know, when he's been given a lot of interviews describing how rigorously he fact checked this, his, his, his thesis, because the, the, the propaganda was so, you know, the, the certainty was among all of the chattering classes that it's sort of like, you know, Majoro is a terrible, ruthless killer. You know, so many people will tell you this, you know, with all the conviction you could muster, but you don't really ever know where it comes from. And in this case, it was the same. We accused the Taliban of being drug traffickers, we were the drug traffickers. And as soon as the Taliban takes charge, you know, they get rid of the drug traffickers. And that's why we hate them. And that's why they hate us.
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A
I want to talk about Iran. Well, we also occupied their country for 20 years. I want to talk about Iran Contra, which I did cover because it was during the Reagan administration and Reagan was having trouble getting funds approved. The Congress was more adversarial. Now it's completely supine, of course. And so they set up this system of trafficking drugs to fund the Contras. Eden Pastora, who was a renegade Contra leader operating out of northern Costa Rica, I knew him as well, was very involved in this, as was Felix Rodriguez, who went by the pseudonym Max Gomez. But talk about that because it's an important moment where you're in essence really setting up this infrastructure which continues.
- [25:41]
B
Sure. And I, and I would just like to say the infrastructure did predate Iran Contra. One of the reasons that these gentlemen have been so resilient in our deep state is because they funded their own, they self funded their operations. So the Church committee happens, you know, the CIA endures all of these scandals in the 1970s. You want to do some, you know, covert ops, who are you going to call? But you know, one thing that really, this was happening very early. So our teammate, you know, was getting in all of these scandals. There was the woman whose husband had been murdered. There was also, he had this wife who was, you know, maybe a bit of a prostitute. She'd been the mistress of Batista and some other big, you know, dictators. And she also posed for smut, lesbian smut. And so they send him off to Nicaragua and he sets up a base there. And kind of this is sort of the start of this sort of, you know, black ops regional, you know, dirty army that, you know, does a lot of coke trafficking, but they also sort of form militias. And there are, it's, there's something called Operation Condor, which actually turns out to be two things, but maybe they are the same. And it supposedly started with Pinochet and the Argentinian.
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A
It was, it was three countries that united to fight communism led perhaps by Argentina and Chile. Right. Operation Condor.
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B
Yes. So yes, that is the, the one that, you know, most people know and supposedly launched in 1975. But I was speaking to a scholar of this stuff who's saying really it started with the, the murder of Che Guevara posing as a Bolivian, you know, as a Bolivian colonel or. But, but Felix Rodriguez, this Bay of Pigs veteran and this sort of, you know, longtime CIA asset, you know, and he also, you know, he not only took Guevara's Rolex, but apparently he's, he, he would brag that he had cut off his finger and sent it to Fidel Castro. So I've been told that this, and this is in 1967. This is sort of the soft launch of Operation Condor in the beginning of this kind of like cooperation between all of these right wing forces in throughout Latin. There's another Operation Condor in Mexico that started in the early 70s. That was a crackdown. It was a specifically DEA, sort of DEA, Mexican military project that cracked down on marijuana farmers. And this was, you know, I don't know, you know, if there's, if they were the same thing or, but it had some of the same effects. It was this real crackdown on, you know, left wing sort of guerrilla movements, you know, labor organizers. It was, they, it was very easy for them to get sort of rounded up in this, in this, you know, blitz to eradicate marijuana throughout Mexico. And so, you know, altogether we see an enormous amount of cooperation. A lot of it is orchestrated by the CIA. Pinochet at some point comes in and does some things that the CIA supposedly doesn't know about. The C was very, you know, there's one, I read one interesting passage about how the CIA wasn't really on board with Operation Condor. They weren't entirely behind it and they were very, very intent on making sure that it wasn't headquartered in Miami because that would have been the obvious place to headquarters, such a mission. But all of these guys funded their operations by trafficking massive quantities of drugs. And this is something that like there is on the left, I think there's this sort of conventional wisdom. I, there's a public intellectual, Michael Massey, he's got a genius grant, he's written a few books on drug policy. And you know, his line on Gary Webb was always like it didn't really matter.
- [30:19]
A
For people who don't know, Gary Webb was the report reporter who really broke the story. He did break the story of the shipment of cocaine by Contras and CIA affiliated operatives into American cities like Oakland. The press, the establishment press worked overtime, including I was at the New York Times to discredit him. They discredited him not by going down and checking on his reporting or trying to re report what he did, but by getting background briefings at the CIA. And then he ultimately committed suicide.
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B
Yes. And you know, with the benefit of, of hindsight, it is absolutely mind blowing to read any of the, you know, the reports from Iran Contra or, you know, a lot of the sources that I used in this story just came from some of the Collections of declassified JFK files. Right, because that, you know, these guys also were deeply involved in that assassination and others. And you can look up, you know, anybody who was a Cuban exile in Miami in the 60s, you know, you can probably see if they've had any prominence. You could probably find some information about them in these files. But anyway, you look at the evidence that was just known by the end of the 80s about the CIA involvement and the Contra involvement in drug trafficking, and this wasn't new news. One thing that Gary Webb, really, a connection that he really nailed down was the connection between the drug dealers that really first popularized crack in. I think Rick Ross was the name of one of them in 1980. Because when crack hit, I mean, it, it, it hit, it. It changed everything. When I started writing for newspapers in the mid late 90s, you know, crack was still people under the influence, the source of a lot of violence in, in cities. It, you know, it was a drug that really had just an, you know, a devastating effect on already devastated American cities. And he nailed down the connection between this CIA, this just massive supply of cheap drug and this, you know, desperation to find new customers for this stuff. And to do that, they had to go to people who had way less money than your average cocaine consumer. And that's what they did with it. This supply matters. You know, there's this idea that the only way you can really fight drug, you know, addiction and the scourge of illegal drugs is, is by working on the demand. And, and there's an element of truth to that. It makes a lot of sense. But the fact is our government's run by drug traffickers, our institutions of power. And that's one of the reasons, you know, look at what the Sacklers did. That was a supply side, you know, addiction epidemic. And we allow these things, you know, for whatever reason, but the evidence was absolutely overwhelming that the CIA, that the highest levels of the American intelligence apparatus were deeply involved. And even that, you know, there's a documentary that came out recently that, that, that has a lot of quite a few DEA and, and other intelligence officers from the 1980s saying that Felix Rodriguez himself, remember this, this character who assassinated Che Guevara.
- [34:29]
A
He didn't actually assassinate Guevara. He was a Bolivian soldier shot. But he was there just as a small point.
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B
He said he just, he just cut his finger off after he was dead.
- [34:40]
A
Well, no, he sent that. He, they, they, they. He's assassinated in the sense that they ordered. They, they determined that there was no way Che was going to he was captured alive, of course, was going to live, but he didn't actually pull the trigger. They got some poor Bolivian soldier to do it. That's just a small footnote.
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B
Sorry.
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A
Read John Lee Anderson's great book on Che.
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B
So. So, but Felix Rodriguez is supposedly now, according to these folks, that the guy who actually ordered the, the murder, the torture and subsequent, a DEA agent who had sort of, you know, run afoul of the, that had become sort of a whistleblower.
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A
This is Kiki.
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B
Kiki Camarena. Yeah. And, and that is something that, you know, the cartels had long sort of been been blamed for. Rodriguez. Now somebody tried to, I think sue the Netflix documentarian for defamation. But Felix Rodriguez, who still alive and still kicking and indeed recently hosted none other than Alvaro Uribe, former Colombian Prime Minister and good, good friend of Marco Rubio at a Bay of Pigs reunion event. So, so Felix Rodriguez is still a figure of some prominence in Miami. These got a lot of blood on his hands, allegedly and you know, and you know, not allegedly and by his own, you know, by his own testimony. So. But these are, this is the type of guy who, you know, is sort of in the milieu of this crew that ran this drug trafficking organization that Marco Rubio's brother in law had sort of ascended relatively, you know, the, to the number two spot and essentially. And another thing is that is interesting about Rubio's own biography is that he has said that his father trained at 18 in, I forget where, but he trained in some training camp in Central America to this is this would have been back in the 40s for a mission that never, you know, came off to overthrow and possibly assassinate Trujillo, the dictator of the long time, I think maybe 30 year dictator of the Dominican Republic who was sort of a, you know, CIA asset and then sort of a CIA thorn in its side for many years. So I don't know, that's the only sign, never forgotten that Rubio's own family was involved in any of this stuff. His family came to Miami before the revolution escaping Batista and then subsequently, you know, would move back and it kind of scraped some money together because I don't think that anybody in his family was particularly, you know, privileged. Rubio would change all that. And one thing that's really also fascinating is that the prosecutor that prosecuted his brother in law and the entire drug trafficking organization then, you know, the following year prosecuted Manuel Noriega in a really fascinating trial. That is another one of these, you know, unbelievable windows into the CIA involvement in Drug trafficking, because, you know, Nora Yeage's defense attorney and a lot of evidence was suppressed in this case. But, you know, his defense attorney was constantly, you know, cross examining various government witnesses, saying, like, okay, you know, but, you know, didn't, didn't. Wasn't the CIA paying Noriega this whole time as well? And, you know, Noriega claimed that he'd made $10 million cooperating with the CIA over the years. They never had any problem with him, you know, facilitating money laundering. And that's the other thing, you know, so there's, there's a lot of rich history. That prosecutor, then his wife gives Rubio his first job, literally, like the, the year after the indictment or that, you know, I think that this might still be going on, like during the trial or directly after the trial. The prosecutor's wife, Ileana Rose. God, what is his last name? I can never. This guy, she's a giant in the Congress in Miami a lot. A good friend of W. Wasserman Schultz and her father was another Cuban exile, deeply involved in Voice of America, I believe. But this congresswoman gave Marco Rubio an internship when he got out of high school. And, and you know, they were very early on it was decided that he was, you know, sort of a preternatural political talent. So, you know, this ties to drug traffickers never stopped Marco Rubio, but he is very sensitive about the story, really went on a little jihad against Univision when they broke the story. And it's just not really necessarily part of the conventional wisdom of who he is. And I think it's important not because I would accuse Marco Rubio of being involved in drug trafficking himself, but understanding the landscape of social capital. Not to sound annoying in Miami in the 1980s, to understand how intertwined right wing politics and drug trafficking are in that community and how sort of this cognitive dissonance is just something that everybody lives and breathes down there. You know, drugs, drugs are only illegal. You know, drug crimes are only illegal when the wrong people are committing them. And, and that is something that is understood in, I think, throughout Latin America that we don't seem to comprehend.
- [41:25]
A
Yeah, you succinctly write drug traffickers who are allied with the CIA's ideological objectives were protected, assisted, and or recruited as assets, while drug traffickers who bribed or cooperated with leftists crossed the agency or outlived their usefulness, were set up for prosecution or discarded. That's precisely correct. And I, I want to also mention, and you know, you may have heard this, but the Common understanding is that Maduro, like Sheinbaum in Mexico, was fairly clean.
- [42:05]
B
Oh, my God. Yes, I have read the indictment against Maduro. There are episodes. It's a, it's a strange document. Nothing like the, the indictment of Juan Orlando Hernandez, which is very, you know, it's a classic indictment. The evidence is there. You see it. I don't know how, you know, the grand jury that, you know, I could see a Florida grand jury going for this, but I, it's, it's, it, it, it's, it's not very strong. And one of the things, one of the pieces of evidence, one of the passages that was most bizarre to me was this. They, they, they have a section about toward this 2013 drug bust. The biggest drug bust in the, you know, drug seizure in the history of commercial air travel was 2013. Charles de Gaulle Airport, probably one of the biggest, you know, most busiest places airports in, in the world. 1.3 tons of cocaine are found in 33 suitcases in this Air France flight from Caracas. And you know, immediately Maduro, who is very new Chavez, has just died. He's just taken over. He has, you know, 25, you know, airplane, airport security and sort of military officers who are involved in the airport operation arrested. And then this strange British guy gets arrested, he, for having claimed on a wiretap that he was the actual owner of the 1.3 tons of cocaine. He's, you know, a very strange figure. You know, supposedly a big crime boss in the uk, but, but he's never really been written about before that except for some, you know, very strange, like harassment charges. Doesn't seem particularly bright. And his lawyer claims, and then he later claims, no, he was just saying that the coke was his on the wiretap to get them off his back. I don't understand. I've been meaning to kind of look into this a little bit more closely. But, but it seems like it was some sort of setup. This whole thing. It's a very strange way to try and traffic cocaine. Just putting it into suitcases in a commercial airliner that is destined for the busiest passenger airport in the world. Something about that is a little off to me. The whole thing is a little off. And there was never any suggestion that Maduro had any involvement or knowledge in that. And, and at the time, you know, none of the investigations revealed anything of the sort. But it's used in this, it's deployed in this indictment as like this, you know, this sign of like what a, you know, sort of, you know, unbelievably Prodigious drug trafficker Maduro is. So a lot of it is stuff like that. There's something about Malaysian heating oil. It's, it's, it's that the fact is that commerce itself in Venezuela is mostly criminalized because of the severity of the sanctions that we've imposed over the years on the country. So, you know, there, you know, I think that we almost feel like, you know, as you see with the, you know, the blowing up the oil tankers, there's this sense of entitlement that we have to sort of get our way with Venezuela because we've literally criminalized most of the economic activity that, you know, that that country is involved in. Another thing about Maduro is that he has two, two nephews who were, apparently, they were arrested for narco trafficking a few years back and they sort of claimed that they were framed. They don't seem, they're another. That doesn't seem particularly intelligent. They were trying to do a drug deal so that they could get some money to win, I think, the 2018 election. And, but they, this massive quantity of cocaine apparently was found in their room at La Romana. I think that's what it's called. It's a resort in the Dominican Republic. It's owned by the Fanul family. And one Menendez, one Bob Menendez in 2013, claimed that he was, that the Fanul family was trying to set him up by sending whores to his villa at La Romana. I, I just, just triggered something in my mind. Like, I wonder, I wonder if there's something to that. I wonder if that, that, that, you know, that cocaine they found really belonged to the narco nephews. You know, what's really going on there. I, I want to delve a lot more deeply into this, but the, the indictment against him. I don't, I don't, I don't understand how they think now, now Miami, if they were trying him in Miami, you know, he might be a dead man. But in New York. Are they going to get a conviction in New York on this? I don't, you know, it seems absurd.
- [47:39]
A
I want to go back to Rubio. You write, when Marco Rubio maligns the efficacy of interdiction and other traditional law enforcement approaches to mitigating narco trafficking in favor of military operations, as he did in a recent speech on Trump's speedboat bombings, he is contradicting every empirical evaluation of drug war efficacy that exists. Yes, but he is also pining for a kind of Cold War era blanket license to commit dirty War in the name of some bigger goal. I was telling you before we went into the interview that I was in Argentina at the end of the dirty War. Of course Carter had imposed some sanctions which Reagan lifted a full throated support under the Reagan administration for this junto which disappeared 30,000 of its own citizens. But it was common knowledge that in police stations there were large freezer, industrial size freezers full of cocaine. And when we talk about that dirty war, that nexus which I think you capture in this story between drug trafficking and the desapaticidos, the killing of labor union leaders, student leaders, they're intimately intertwined.
- [49:02]
B
There's a book called Powder Burns, I believe by a former DEA agent recalling his odyssey of being rap fucked by CIA guys in his efforts to combat drug trafficking in Latin America in the 80s and early 90s. And you know, at one point he recalls a few conversations where you know, somebody's like, well you know, the war on drugs is important, but the war on communism is even more important. And he's like, you know, like where are you from? Because I'm from, I forget, you know, I'm from like a, a city that's been, you know, devastated by deindustrialization and now is being, you know, brought to its knees by addiction. I don't really, you know, I'm not a fan of communism, but I don't really think that it's a, it's a threat to, to my society. And he just describes how he was not able to understand that rationalization. But now we're using the drug war as its own, you know, as the same sort of, like I said, like blanket license. And you know, what it really is, I guess is the same as the Cold War is this country has, you know, decided to threaten. This is another thing I, there's so much talk about the oil curse. And it is true. I grew up, a lot of my youth I spent in China. My dad was in the State Department. And I always wonder, you know, gosh, like, you know, the Taiwanese, like they had a lobby just like the Miami lobby. There's just a Cuba lobby and the Zionist lobby. They had the China lobby and they traffic drugs and they were bad guys and they, they were right wing. But at some point, you know, they, they, they maybe they switched drugs for, for bicycles and then semiconductors and they started to build factories in China even though they were technically at war. And you know, those two places are very interdependent right now. We, there's a lot of parallels that we like to make but why were they allowed? Why was China allowed to build an industrial economy? And why did we allow our agents in Taiwan to facilitate this? You know, would they have been even able to do it if they hadn't sort of all done it in Taiwan first and they had the language, yada, yada. It's just such a different story. And it seems like, you know, part of the. Maybe part of the benefit that China had, other than, you know, it's 1 billion people, was that they didn't have any resources to exploit. It had to be there. Their human capital, as they like to say in the business. But, you know, we do not allow countries with resources to nationalize those resources in hopes of trying to, you know, nationalize the surpluses that they might bring and then diversify their economy into something more sustainable. The resource curse is something that, you know, countless nations, obviously Libya, you know, Iran, Venezuela, you know, Russia have all tried to sort of reverse and figure out how to deal with. And whenever they do, we. They feel our wrath. And so it really pisses me off when, you know, pundits talk about the resource curse as though it's not, you know, really the sort of, you know, like gratuitous sanctions for having the temerity to threaten hegemony curse.
- [53:01]
A
Well, that's how Pinochet was overthrown in 73. It was at the service of Anaconda Copper. It's how Arbenz was overthrown in 54 in Guatemala on behalf of United Fruit. As soon as you go. And that's why. That's what's happening with Venezuela. And Trump, unlike previous presidents, was quite open about it. It's about the oil, the largest reserves of oil in the world. And the article is smart and good and people should read it. The Narco Terrorist Elite. It's in the American Prospect where Moe works as the investigative editor. It's really a fine piece of journalism and important for understanding what's driving this policy and who Marco Rubio is. Thank you, Mo.
- [53:48]
B
And thank you so much. It's an honor.
- [53:51]
A
Thanks to Victor and Diego and Max, Sophia and Thomas who produced the show. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
- [54:09]
B
Sam.